Consultant developer Keith Sware

Dynamic market places require small amounts of commercial value, delivered frequently; this is an effective strategy in a competitive environment. Analysis and collaboration with stakeholders to define your need is the first step. Defining an end game / conditions-of-satisfaction, is next, since we will need to confirm that delivered work is complete. Defining an end game helps us both, to clarify the rules which will be used to audit and validate which deliverable goal(s) have been achieved.

As a freelance worker, I work on small – medium size projects (a few weeks to 12 months).

I work from home or on-site with clients within the UK – EU

Whether your need is to bring in an extra resource, to fulfil an urgent business challenge, or provide flexible technical expertise that you currently lack, I will fill the gap.

I provide software design and development services for different types of product systems, ranging from case management systems, automated KPI / dashboard reporting, database back-end systems, API (Application Programming Interface) code libraries and Business process automation. Having worked with 20 development teams on 30+ projects, I like to vary the types of technical / business challenges that I work on, this keeps me on my toes and makes work exciting.

Specialities: Research, design and development of software based IT systems and business process automation.

Blue sky project planning is never good; such projects tend to cost a lot of ‘time-sheet’ time and money. Projects sometime run into situations where businesses are faced with making difficult choices; scrapping project work or having to continually re-factor designs and business requirements. Just in order to reduce project challenges and business costs in order to balance the work against budget levels or time constraints.

It’s best to validate what is viable and technically feasible, then to prioritize what will deliver the most value. In addition, we make sure that automatic testing is keeping pace with business requirements and technical deployments. Automated testing of new features is a fundamental part of the development-life-cycle in a modern development team.

Blue sky project: A piece of work with no defined end game!

A piece of work with no definitive end in sight, because two parties forgot to agree on business needs, what’s to be achieved. What features are critical, what is nice but can be dropped, what is viable and a candidate for a deliverable milestone.

Don’t start working on something unless you know how to test it first; it is only viable if the business has defined and agreed on the-end-game.

A good place to begin: Project inception – Is by identifying key deliverables, this will facilitate the process of highlighting business objectives and milestones, this in turn simplifies the negotiation of how to deliver what your business needs.